Google+? It’s very simple

Science Online New York (SoNYC) encourages audience participation in the discussion of how science is carried out and communicated online. To celebrate our first birthday, we are handing the mic over to the audience so that anyone who would like to participate will get five minutes to show off their favourite online tool, application or website that makes science online fun. To complement the celebrations, we’re hosting a series of guest posts on Soapbox Science where a range of scientists share details about what’s in their online science toolkits. Why not let us know how they compare to the tools that you use in the comment threads?

Talk to any publisher and they will tell you that Google is still by far the biggest player in search, so if you want people to read about your science, you need to pay attention to the dark arts of search engine optimization (SEO). Although Google users can turn social search results off, the vast majority do not, so social is now an inescapable part of search. Apart from posting interesting information that people want to read, there are several elements involved in Google optimization. One is the rather technical markup resulting in “rich snippets” – which appear with your avatar as a trusted brand in search results. A much simpler way to boost search visibility is to build a presence on Google+.

As part of our strategy to encourage more people to get interested in plant science (because there are now no plant science degrees in the UK), for the past few months we have been publishing on Google+ alongside our other online spaces on Twitter, Facebook and our blog, but it’s on Google+ where we’ve seen the fastest growth recently.